Thursday, January 26, 2012
I quickly modified and packaged a pure Python implementation of the rsync algorithm today. It’s on Github and PyPi. It’s going to be used in the open-source, symmetrically-encrypted, bandwidth-efficient, cross-platform backup software that I’m writing. Because why, for fuck’s sake, would you trust *all the files* on your computer, plus your cryptographic scheme, and potentially, keys, to a bunch of capitalist pig-dogs?
I hope other people find this useful, because making Python modules is totally not as exciting as just coding in Python.
And jetlag FTL: I need to sleep now. And WTF, America: I hate your filthy guts and I’m leaving ASAFP.
I’m sitting in a cottage in the Italian countryside outside Florence, eating a breakfast of cafe brewed in an antique mocha, fette biscottate con riso with vegan hazelnutella and arance amare, a spread of bitter oranges. Outside the lead-paned window with iron fittings, I can see hills covered with vineyards, and a haze of clouds below covers a snowy valley with forested mountains in the distance. The floors and roof are both constucted of bricks and timbers, and a castlemonte woodstove creaks and crackles behind me.
Last night I shared a sleeping compartment on a night train from Munich with four noisy Estonians and a cute Italian hacker boy, who cuddled next to me reading white papers on homomorphic cryptography. He works on Tor, and also writes screenplays and acted in an Italian television series.
We hiked through the countryside, through olive orchards, practicing mentalist magic on kachi trees with rotten fruits, daring them to drop to the ground. We marched through the keep of a fortress older than the country I was born in.
I don’t want to go home. Or rather, I’ve rediscovered that my home is a terrible place.
<3 <3 <3
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
In Berlin, on New Year’s Eve, I participated in a race through the streets of Berlin, called Journey to the End of the Night — except this one, being at the end of the year, is called Journey to the End of the Year. The rules: run through six checkpoints in order, complete a challenge at each one, and don’t get caught by the chasers or lose your armband.
I formed a running team with an Italian hacker who works on Tor, and his friend from Greece who is also a hacker. They showed up thirty minutes late (for which the organizers, my friends from Vienna and San Francisco, postponed the race) with a backpack full of explosives. Let me tell you: Berliners take their fireworks very seriously, and firework safety inversely so. It’s not uncommon at all for a complete stranger to throw the equivalent of a quarter stick of dynamite in your direction. Also, I noticed that Berliners like to surprise you by throwing bottles and chairs.
So, armed to the teeth with explosives, we set out running through the streets with others chasing us. Because there was a joke rule that my friend Redbeard’s beard was a safe zone, I ended up having to kidnap him from a checkpoint by aiming explosives at the other participants in the race, and a few of the organizers too. Redbeard is awesome. He’s a professional kernel hacker with a red beard down to his waist, if the later wasn’t obviously by the name. I also had to dodge the aforementioned chairs, bottles, and fireworks with parkour while wearing a tinfoil hat. And at the end of it all, I found myself at C-Base, a hackerspace built into the remains of a two-millenia-old alien spaceship crash, discussing DIY soldering iron buttprobes, theoretical physics, and hackers on sailboats, while drinking Chink Chank Chunk (Club Mate with sugar, lime, vodka).
Oh Berlin, how I want to live in you!
